"Solar Air Heating Systems", Steve Kornher and Andy Zaugg

The Good News -- Bad News

 

The Very Good News is that Solar Air Heating Systems is now back in print.  You can get the information on availability from the publisher here.

 

The Bad News is that it can't be a free download anymore.   The introductory chapter on solar air collector options, and the the full index of the book are still available below as downloads, so you can get a good feel for the material in the book.  I highly recommend purchasing the book if you are interested in building a solar air collector.

 

I'd like to thank Steve and Andy for making the book available over the past year as a free download, and I hope the exposure it got here helped get it back into print.  Thanks guys!

 

"The Complete Handbook of Solar Air Heating Systems", by Steve Kornher with Andy Zaugg. This is the best book I know of on designing and building solar air collector heating systems.

There are home heating projects you can build in a half a day, all the way up to ones that will take a month, but will  heat your whole house. 

 

Solar Air Heating Systems

 

Steve now operates Flying Concrete, a construction company near San Miguel de Allende, Mexico that specializes in concrete buildings that are works of art.  If you want to be wowed take a look at his website: www.FlyingConcrete.com.

 

 

The authors of this book built dozens solar air collectors  for many types of homes during the solar "rush" of the 1970's and early 80's.  The book documents what they learned from designing and building many collectors.   The book is still largely up-to-date, in that when oil prices went down in the 80's most activity in solar air collectors stopped.  I have noted a few changes (e.g. new materials) that have come along that you might want to take advantage of here.

 

 

 

 

As always, do not totally rely on the correctness of this (or any) reference -- do your homework.

 

 

 

 

Downloads by Chapter:

Introduction -- Site Built Collectors in the San Luis Valley (263 KB pdf)

 

Chapter 1 -- Keeping Warm: The Principles of Solar Heating (355 KB pdf)

 

Chapter 2 -- A Survey of Air-Heating-Options (1.2 MB pdf)

 

Chapter 3 -- The Economics of Solar Heating  (Coming)

 

Chapter 4 -- Designing the Collector (3.0 MB pdf)

 

Chapter 5 -- Construction Materials (1.7 MB pdf)

 

Chapter 6 -- Thermostats, Blowers (1.3 MB pdf)

 

Chapter 7 -- Building Passive Air Heaters: The Window Box and Thermosiphoning Air Panel (2.6 MB pdf)

 

Chapter 8 -- Building Active Air Collectors  (5.0 MB pdf)

Some newer information from Andy Zaugg to supplement Chapter 8

Collector Cross Section From Above (40K pdf)

Collector Cross Section From East (80K pdf)

Collector Metal Parts (44K pdf)

Chapter 9 -- Designing and Installing Duct Systems (3.2 MB pdf)

 

Chapter 10 -- Solar Water Heating (1.2 MB pdf)

 

Chapter 11 -- Thermal Storage for Large Systems (2.1 MB pdf)

 

Chapter 12 -- Some Shining Examples (1.5 MB pdf)

 

Appendices -- Appendix1 through 6 (2.7MB pdf)

  1. Sun Path Charts

  2. Wire Schematics

  3. Working With Officials

  4. The Characteristics of an Efficient Flat Plate Collector

  5. Monitoring Your System

  6. Calculating Static Pressure

Index -- Full, searchable Index (72K pdf)

 

 

As always, do not totally rely on the correctness of this (or any reference) -- do your homework.

 

Gary 07/15/06, R10/18/06, R11/19/06